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Trans Religion

I've got some partly formed ideas floating around in my head. I've tried to form them into more concrete thoughts and the more I attempt to pin them down, the more they act like jello.

What happens when you disagree with a prominent cultural narrative that's tangled into every fabric of our social and cultural lives? To speak against it is like heresy. That's how it feels to discuss gender identity. Sometimes I'm just blown away by how many people actually believe such a thing exists, as some central universal aspect of human nature that transcends time and place.

It's spoken as truth. People define themselves by this truth and attempt to change language and laws as if the world has always had this notion of personalized identities that one can form and shape and create for themselves. The ever changing fluid identities are not definable. It's a nebulous concept spoken as concrete. It's a fiction created to describe various traits of human existence. What is an identity? What is a gender identity?

There are basic truths about human beings. The material reality of our existence here on earth is formed around these truths. They are things we cannot change or alter. It is written into our DNA and passed onto our children. Everything else, literally everything else is mutable.

There is no such thing as being born in the wrong body. It's not possible. One is either born or they are not and their body exists in the form in which it was born. It stays that way for life or until some force alters that physical form, by accident or with purpose.

My oldest child has always been fascinated by people who radically transform their bodies. She has never felt the desire to do that herself, but she looks on in curiosity toward those that find a need to do that. It's the people who alter their bodies to look like cheetah's or the person who made herself look like Barbie. What propels a person to do those things? She's always wondered about that and shown me pictures and stories of this small population of people who do extreme body modification. Do those people truly believe they are a cheetah or Barbie? My guess is probably not. It's more about fashion and pushing limits.

She sees the transgender trend a bit like that. To her, transgenderism is a form of extreme body modification. I do see her point and it's allowed me to see this whole thing from yet another perspective that I wouldn't have thought of myself. The one distinct difference is that those that alter their body to look like the opposite sex generally believe they have become the opposite sex. They are not simply toying with fashion or pushing limits, they truly believe they are the other sex.

That's where the born in the wrong body ideas come into play. It's a dangerous nonsense notion that someone can actually be born in the wrong body. It assumes a couple of things that I've yet to see a good argument in proving. It assumes that brains are somehow disconnected in a fundamental way to the rest of the body. It's like Dr Finklestein from The Nightmare Before Christmas, who truly believes he can form a whole new human by taking half of his brain and putting it into a different body. It truly is fiction. Nobody has ever been able to do that yet. That's probably a good thing. There's a reason it's been the plot of horror movies and scary tales.

The wrong body/brain idea also assumes that there are some brains that are super male and some that are super female. There are so many things wrong with that idea. Our brains are connected to our body, created by the same DNA, interconnected and awash with chemicals unique to our sexed bodies, unique to the individual. Aside from actual physical reality of biology and human anatomy, what would make a brain male or female? If not for sexed hormones what would make a person believe they are trapped in the wrong body? Liking stereotypes of male or female things? Liking the female or male form that is not your own?

Let's assume for a moment that someone really does feel trapped in the wrong body. That's probably a very crude understanding of gender dysphoria. Would helping someone do extreme body modification truly help that person feel better about their body? Even if that person can never become the other? Partly, my thought is that it will only widen that feeling, creating an ever expanding gap of never achieving that goal of becoming other. No matter how much a person can try, it cannot be done. No matter how much surgery and drugs a person takes, it cannot be done. Even if every single person you ever met from that point on in your life believed you to be the opposite sex, there would still be one person who knew the truth.

This is where the lie becomes dangerous. Compelling people to falsify their own bodies is truly unkind. Compelling others to agree with you is wrong. It doesn't make you suddenly a different sex. It makes you a liar. It makes everyone around you complicit in your lie. Have you ever met a compulsive liar? Have you ever spent time around one? Have you ever been the victim of such a person? I leave you, reader, to answer those questions for yourself.

I don't believe in gender identity. It's a made up idea meant to describe an individual's belief about themselves that is not about their material reality. When I see people write about their transgender coming out stories, the first thing I think about is that the person is attempting to define themselves with their likes and dislikes and then stereotype those things as male or female. What is says to me, is that the person believes that those things are immutable. It says to me that this person is going to eventually lie to themselves and everyone around them and insist that others be complicit in those lies.

I do not care if someone wants to do extreme body modification. It's not my thing, but obviously it is for others. Do not, however suggest that it has actually turned you into the thing you have modified your body to be.

Gender identity is like Manifest Destiny. People really really believed in Manifest Destiny. The whole colonization of the Americas came about because people really really believed in it. Manifest Destiny was a lot like a religious belief system, a strongly held cultural value system. Gender identity is Manifest Destiny of sexed bodies. It's a belief system that runs over the material reality of people. Manifest Destiny had a lot of collateral damage to bring a new value system in. Perhaps this is just a new next phase of the human chapter of colonization? (There's more to that theory, but best left for a different post.)

Gender identity is primarily a one way street where men are running over women and girls and women and girls are running away from being women and girls.

It's not a nice religion. It's more like a cult. Too many people are drinking the damn koolaid. There's no Jim Jones to point to and blame, but there are a lot of powerful people pushing gender identity.

I wish people would stop with the insane evangelism. Stop telling kids they can pick a different gender if they feel they can. Stop running over parents and women. Just stop.

I started with jello, centered the bitter, and ended with koolaid. How truly bittersweet.

Apologies for the more biting post this time. It had to get out of my head and into words.